redRobe Read online

  When Axl spoke again, his words were calm and reasoned. Without knowing it, he fell into the speech patterns of his old captain. Understated, ironic. The things Axl usually tried to be and mostly failed.

  ‘When you try me, do you get to take my saving the old bastard into account?’

  Colonel Emilio shivered. Criticising the Cardinal lost people more than just promotion… Starting with their heads, if they got lucky. Everything else, and then their heads if they didn’t.

  What Colonel Emilio should have done was slap the prisoner into submission, just in case the two cops at the screen had overheard. But it was too late for that and besides Axl could tell the Colonel was interested.

  ‘I saved his life,’ said Axl, ‘but you already know that

  Colonel Emilio didn’t know, he didn’t know at all. And the Colonel suspected he was learning something it was better not to have been told.

  ‘The republicans almost shot the old bastard,’ said Axl flatly. ‘But I was there, so it didn’t happen. Maybe I was wrong…

  ‘Maybe I should have…’

  ‘Out,’ Colonel Emilio barked and the two cops looked round in surprise. Neither one had been listening but that wasn’t the point. A door slammed and then Axl’s comment hung in the air like a taunt, along with a thin strand of spider’s web and dust motes that danced like slow-turning flakes in a bottle of chilled goldwasser. The expensive kind sold in Austrian cafés ringing the Plaza de Armas.

  Prisoners in La Medicina didn’t question the rights of the Cardinal, not coldly anyway. They cursed and spat defiance or pleaded for their lives or a quick death, or both. Axl wasn’t going to plead. He hadn’t pleaded for the impossible, not for a long time. And he didn’t curse, he left that to his gun. All the same…

  ‘You go back and tell him I saved his life once. Ask the old bastard if he wants it saved again.’

  Power and paranoia, vanity and fear; flip sides born out of the cowardice most people called survival. Me too, thought Axl, surprising himself. The Colonel might not quite believe him. He might decide that Axl’s words were as empty as Axl’s future but all the same…

  Axl would get his meeting with the Cardinal, he was sure of it. Whether he’d get out of the meeting alive was something else again. But just being able to stare the old bastard in the face once more would even the odds.

  Chapter Six

  Sábado

  * * *

  Each breath pulled at his throat and the sour air Pietro sucked into his lungs burnt like smoke from a rubbish tip. The boy thought he wanted water but what he actually needed was enough rest for his tired muscles to purge themselves of lactic acid and his heart to steady.

  Pietro wasn’t sure how old the tunnels were or where they led. All he knew was that most were lined with damp grey stone and that they stank. Shit he could have handled, what with sleeping each night on the floor of the servicios at La Piscina, but this was the sour smell of dust and dead history.

  Sometimes the tunnels were silent except for the rumble of traffic overhead and sometimes Pietro could hear the distant swearing of his pursuers. Now there was noise both behind and ahead. Pietro was sure he’d been running for days and wouldn’t have believed it was only three hours, had there been anyone there to tell him, which there wasn’t.

  Hurtling down the sewer towards the noise ahead, Pietro realised it was the sound of drums and froze. What if the people ahead were worse than those behind? He’d heard the stories about Vou, about old men ridden by gods, cups of blood, smoke, animal sacrifices, drugged girls in torn shifts… whatever, he had no choice.

  Pietro wasn’t sure what he was expecting. Breasts, probably. Naked women—or at least naked from the waist up—dancing to the drums or falling to the ground like drunks. Or maybe a single frenzied woman foaming at the mouth and writhing in the dirt of a cellar floor, while a tall black man slit the throat of a black chicken and drank its blood from a silver chalice.

  What Pietro got was an almost empty brick-lined vault. The drums echoing from an old Sanyo stack. No woman writhing in the dirt. Only an old man with dreadlocks who looked up from the upturned crate that made do as a makeshift altar and frowned at the boy who skidded out of the darkness and stopped, huge gun held tightly in one hand.

  ‘You looking for Sábado?’ The man’s voice was incongruously deep given his spindly, driftwood thin body. He had a cigar in one hand and was wearing a bowler hat.

  Pietro just shook his head. Behind the man was a half-open door and steps ... If Pietro could reach those he could lose himself in the crowd. Maybe jump a tram to the Zona Rosa and the big ‘crete and glass hotels. Find a tourist, either sex. It wouldn’t be pleasant but it would give him a bed for the next few nights. And if he got really lucky they might buy him a ride out of the city, maybe even across the border.

  Time to move. Now, before Spanish Phillipe and the others came crashing out of the tunnels.

  ‘You stay right there, Mon.’

  ‘Like fuck,’ Pietro said and began to edge towards the steps.

  ‘No,’ said the man. ‘Like a good boy.’

  Old… thin… ill. Pietro decided the dreadlocked Vou priest was no real threat but he raised the Colt anyway, then stopped as dark eyes locked onto his, faint tendrils of thought brushing at the edge of his mind, no heavier than cigarette smoke curling up into an open sky.

  On the upturned crate—in front of half a dozen framed postcards, and either side of a copper bowl containing burning embers—stood two candles, little more than wax poured into paper cups and left to set. The kind that street stalls sold by their thousands every day. Crudely printed on the wrappers was a woodblock of a woman gazing heavenward. The old man passed his hands over the cheap candles and they went out, flames guttering into nothing. Then the man passed his hands back the other way and the wicks relit.

  ‘Choose,’ said the Voudun priest.

  Choose what? Pietro shook his head violently and tried to raise the hiPower.

  ‘Wrong choice,’ said the Colt and it was talking to Pietro. Just above where the handle finished and the matt-grey ceramic of the chassis began, a tiny diode flicked from red to steadily-flashing yellow. The gun was on standby.

  Pietro slapped his hand against the Colt, trying to get the diode to change. And when it wouldn’t he reversed the gun and tried to raise it like a club.

  ‘Peace, Mon. Me Sábado ...' The words were dry like leaves, whistling from lips blotched with cancer scars. Sábado took a deep drag from the flame end of his cigar and paused to listen to sounds approaching down the darkened tunnel. Someone swore when they saw the burning candles.

  ‘Hey,’ Sábado looked direct at the gun. ‘You on or off?’

  ‘Off.’

  ‘Good.’ He glared at the Colt. ‘You make sure you stay that way, you hear me?’

  If the Colt could have nodded, Pietro could have sworn it would have done. Instead the hiPower just gave a non-committal grunt and shut down completely, every diode winking out at once.

  ‘Okay,’ the man looked at Pietro, ‘you stand over there.’ He pointed to the back of the vault near the steps and Pietro felt the smoke clear from his head. ‘But you don’t try to leave.’

  Keeping the lifeless Colt to his side, Pietro quietly toggled the ‘on’ button but the gun remained silent. Whatever the old man was doing it worked. Pietro stood where he was told.

  Stiffly, as if bending hurt his back, Sábado stooped and turned off the Sanyo stack, ending the drums. But somehow the silence sounded twice as loud.

  ‘You,’ said the old man, only this time he was speaking to the crowd outside. ‘Make yourselves welcome to Sábado ...'

  Spanish Phillipe came first, blinking at the slight light of the candles or maybe at the heavy smoke rising from the fire bowl on Sábado’s altar. Then the huge man saw Pietro and scowled, sudden anger blocking out his fear.

  ‘Stop.’

  It was a single word and not even loud, but Sábado’s voice was enough to halt Ph
illipe in his tracks. Seeing the big man halt, everyone else behind him stopped too. Though only Phillipe clutched at his chest.

  ‘It’s the smoke,’ Sábado said, ‘sometimes it does that to you…’ The old man beckoned to the five or so men behind Phillipe and waited while they came in slowly. No one had any doubt what the small vault was being used for or what the old man was, even if they didn’t know him by sight or name.

  Phillipe crossed himself and the old man nodded and crossed himself in turn, cigar stub still burning in his fingers as he did so. Then, without pausing he turned to the handful of tri-Ds on the makeshift altar and made a bow as stately as that of any courtier.

  Pietro recognised Cold Blue Lies, who sang for the Family, a wizard called Pa with a snake knotted over his robe and the Little Princess who gazed out from under long lashes, a one-legged infant sleeping on her lap.

  She had other names that one. The Huntress, the Chosen, and Mistress of the Mines. Which mines Pietro didn’t know but there were silver workings to the far south of Day Effé, so it was probably those.

  The boy stopped gazing at the Mistress and realised everyone was looking at him, waiting for some answer. From the way a dark vein tugged at the edge of Phillipe’s heavy jaw, Pietro could tell the huge man thought he was refusing to answer the question.

  ‘Did you kill the patron?’ Sábado repeated patiently. His deep voice held no sense of judgement and his eyes were glazed as if looking inside himself. He was listening hard, but to what Pietro didn’t know.

  Pietro nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘The boy kills the man, so you kill the boy… ?’ Sábado asked.

  Phillipe nodded.

  ‘You think the boy knows this when he do it?’

  Silence was the big man’s only answer.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Sábado and turned to the boy, one thin hand flipping sideways as if to introduce Pietro’s answer, which didn’t come easy and—in the end—didn’t come at all ...

  ‘Tell me,’ said Sábado, sucking on the stub of his cigar. ‘Tell me why...'

  If Pietro could have done, he would. Anything and everything was better than standing there in the vault being watched by those eyes. Everyone was waiting for his answer but the boy didn’t have one. He wasn’t thinking about how to get away from there, because Pietro didn’t believe he would.

  He wasn’t thinking at all.

  Sábado nodded and stepped over to the boy. Age-mottled fingers reached for the neck of Pietro’s T-shirt and ripped, tearing the cheap cotton in two. There were no tell-tale trademarks on Pietro’s chest or back, no tattoos or subdermal barcodes, but Sábado didn’t need visible proof to know the obvious.

  And confirmation would be there somewhere. If not in a trademark around one nipple or flash-burned to the inside of his thigh, then in the genome itself, clauses and sub-clauses, copyrights, patents and disclaimers of liability coded into the kid’s junk DNA.

  ‘I’m right… ?’ The old man looked at the boy. ‘You soulless?’

  Pietro said nothing. Life had taught him that was usually safest.

  ‘Thought so,’ said Sábado sucking at his teeth in disgust. He took the boy’s hands in his own and held them, palms up looking at broken blisters and rough, not-quite-formed calluses. Pietro’s nails were broken too, one split so badly that half of it had peeled back like yellow shell.

  Pietro hadn’t been coded to survive in the fields or work with dangerous chemicals in a factory, he had none of the protective augmentations the pro-clone movement boasted about.

  ‘A house clone?’ Sábado asked. He sounded sympathetic.

  Pietro wanted to say that he hadn’t minded. Not back at the beginning. At Mr Rubenstein’s house he’d had his own bedroom and a tiny Matsui screen, even his own newsfeed to watch the novelas. Eating leftovers and scraps hadn’t offended him. Waking early to prepare breakfast had been a pleasure. He liked the big house when it was empty and quiet.

  But then came the UN ruling. Indenturing clones was illegal. Or rather, it was illegal to indenture a clone that had been hatched and batched specifically for work. Non whole-body spares, surrogate children and medical use were exempt. Under the UN’s ruling you could own—that was, adopt—copies of yourself but not of anyone else, especially not of a mass-produced commercial model.

  It turned out Mr Rubenstein hadn’t really owned Pietro at all, just leased him from a Korean employment agency in Santa Fe; that was what Mr Rubenstein told Pietro anyway. But when Pietro went to Santa Fe the company wasn’t there.

  ‘Here, take this…’ Sábado passed Pietro the wet stub of his cigar and the boy dragged smoke into his lungs, dimethyltryptamine swamping his nervous system. All Pietro felt was dizzy. The leaf was prime semillia, not synthetic but grown from seeds hand planted in fields outside Havana. Sábado was given one cigar a week from a Cuban cardiologist in his congregation.

  ‘Tell me everything,’ said the old man. So Pietro did. Starting with Mr Rubenstein sitting Pietro down at the big kitchen table with a glass of juice squeezed from fresh oranges.

  Free to go turned out to mean had to go…And that was the end of Pietro’s world. He was free to starve and be driven across the Mexican border by American police only to be dumped back into the US by the Mexican authorities.

  Only one time, the last time he got shunted, a fat police woman in San Antonio with pillows for breasts told him about leaseback. It wasn’t slavery and it certainly wasn’t restricted to clones but… She paused, looked thoughtful… clones were finding it very useful.

  And so Pietro found himself finally owning identity papers, and owing the next twenty-five years of his life to Brazilian Baptists who subcontracted his housing and feed to an orphanage at Zampango that leased him to La Piscina. As stories went it wasn’t even that remarkable.

  Pietro blinked away his tears and the vault was suddenly empty except for Sábado.

  ‘Wha’happen?’

  The old man grinned, showing nicotine-stained teeth and two tiny vampire canines. The small screw-in kind the poor chose, not fold-back incisors that cost real credit.

  ‘They went, Mon. Back to that bar to finish the Cachaca. Time you go too.’ He nodded towards the stone steps. ‘You take care now, you hear?’

  The old man took an amulet from around his own scrawny neck and put it gently over Pietro’s head, adjusting the leather thong until the knot was to one side, just above Pietro’s breastbone. The bundle of feathers reached to the boy’s waist but that didn’t matter. People would still look at him and know he was protected, that he’d walked with death through the valley.

  ‘Go,’ said the old man, then jerked his chin towards the lifeless Colt still held in Pietro’s fingers. ‘And leave that t’ing behind. Sábado want to talk to it.’

  Chapter Seven

  The Wheel of Life

  A wolf howled somewhere on the edge of the mountain, up where Mai was headed, where the air was thinner and even more cold than where she was now if that were possible. Mai thought it was a wolf, the animal certainly howled the way she thought wolves should howl: sounding desolate and sad, and very dangerous.

  There was something wrong with the sky, but Mai couldn’t work out just what it was. The colour looked right, pale blue with low grey clouds that clung to the lower slopes. And birds swung high in the air currents. Not just the small familiar swifts she knew from the brothel, but larger, more exotic species she’d only seen before on newsfeeds. Even a pale osprey that skimmed low over a small silver lake behind her, its talons extended though it swept upwards again without ever catching a fish.

  The priest didn’t look at the mountains or birds. He was talking to a ragged Tibetan boy with a hoe who’d stood watching them as they rode up the track towards him.

  ‘How far…’

  Almond-eyes regarded Father Sylvester passively. Dark eyes set in a wide face under a crudely-cut thatch of black hair. The boy was a lo-pa, high valley Tibetan and the ma
n wasn’t. As far as the boy was concerned that was all he needed to know. He’d been busy clearing rocks from a field until the strangers interrupted him and he wanted to get back to his job.

  The man on the black stallion snorted in exasperation. He was cold, wet and tired. And, worse than that, he was four days closer to death than when he selected Mai at the brothel. Pulling a small gold box from his coat pocket, Father Sylvester flipped open its enamel lid and tapped a pinch of white powder onto the back of his shaking hand. One sniff and raw cocaine blasted the back of his throat, melting like snow. He didn’t offer any to the boy and he certainly didn’t offer any to Mai, sitting silently behind him. The priest didn’t approve of children taking drugs.

  ‘How far to Cocheforet?’ Father Sylvester didn’t quite add you moron, but the unspoken insult was understood. The priest wasn’t looking for an exact distance, what he wanted to know was how much longer this journey was going to take him. The Jesuit master had never been a patient man and dying was making him more impatient still.

  He didn’t have time to waste.

  ‘Well?’ Father Sylvester said as he kicked his horse forward, almost trampling the boy. ‘How far?’

  For a moment it looked like the boy planned to swing his hoe at the priest’s head, but he just shrugged instead and spat into the road before turning away, swinging his hoe from side to side.

  He didn’t know the man was a priest, of course. Just as he didn’t know the girl with her feet in the second set of stirrups was the man’s prisoner, her wrists bound behind her back so tightly it cut off the blood supply to her fingers. All the boy noticed about the girl was that her face was tear-stained and she wore a ragged bead-and-feather talisman round her neck.

  Father Sylvester almost hissed in irritation. He didn’t need the boy noticing the talisman or the girl and he didn’t need her to start crying again.

  She’d never been on a horse before and they’d been riding for two days, almost without stop. The inside of Mai’s thighs were raw, her buttocks ached and every stumble from the horse went straight up her spine to explode inside her head. Worst of all, the man wouldn’t stop and when she’d pissed herself a mile back, urine running in a stinging river between her leg and the saddle, all the priest had done was flip up his arm and backhand her across the face, without comment, without even looking round.